Ilya Vladimirovich (né Eliyahu Vulfovich) Galant (; February 25, 1867 â September 29 or 30, 1941) was a Russian historiographer, archaeographer, educator, and writer on the history of the Jews in Ukraine.
Galant was born into a Jewish family in the city of Niezhin. His brother, Hirsh, was a pharmacist in Vyazniki, Vladimir Oblast. He received a religious Jewish education, and later with the assistance of professors from the Nizhyn Historical and Philological Institute, he took up independent studies in the library, and was accepted as a member of the Nizhyn Historical and Philological Society.
In the early 1890s, he moved to Kiev. From 1910 onwards, he taught Jewish history and Judaism in secondary schools, becoming a member of the Kiev Society of Rabbis. He studied documents of Jewish history located at the Saint Vladimir Imperial University of Kiev. He published articles in publications Kievan Antiquity (), Orient (), and Future (), including many on the history of the Jews. He used many of the connections he had made with the elites in his lived cities to gain access to rare documents to do research for his writings. These included limited-access archival documents, as well as documents that were obscure and not well known among historians.
In 1919, he helped found the , and later headed the organization from 1924 to 1929, nicknamed "The Galant Commission". He prepared and published two collections of its works in the Ukrainian language. His decision to publish in Ukrainian was criticized internationally for adding putting another language into rotation for publication on Jewish history, but many Ukrainians supported the decision. In the late 1920s, many Jewish members of the Bolsheviks began to criticize their work, along with the Department of Jewish Culture at the All-Ukrainian Academy of Science. In 1929, he was dismissed from the Academy after his commission's liquidation.
On either September 29 or 30, 1941, he was executed along 33,000 other Jews in Ukraine at the Babi Yar Massacre.
Galant was a large believer in Ukrainian-Jewish unity and sought to dispel what he considered "myths" of universal hatred between the two peoples through history. He sought to unify both groups together through revisionism of the history of Jews in the historical regions that made up Ukraine. He became largely unpopular with Soviet authorities for his ideologies of nationalism (both for Jews in Russia as well as that of Zionism) and unified minorities and was branded bourgeois for it. He was unique in his position that he desired to create a specific Ukrainian-Jewish nationalism. Many of his works concerned instances of blood libel and other incidents of antisemitism in Eastern Europe, and he included many archival materials that he acquired from his research in various government institutions.
In a 1910 response to Galant's brochure on the Pale of Settlement, Leo Tolstoy, shortly before his death, gave support for some of Galant's work, stating:<blockquote>I have read your brochure, and it seems to me that the injustice of establishing the Pale of Settlement is explained in the brochure with complete conviction for people who are accessible to these arguments of common cense. My attitude towards the decrees by which people are prohibited from enjoying the natural rights of every living being and living on the surface of the globe where it is convenient or desirable for them, there can be nothing but a negative, since I have always considered and do consider the admission of any violence by man against man to be the source of all th troubles experienced by humanity.
I cannot help but consider violence in restricting the place of residence to be, moreover, extremely absurd and not productive in achieving its goal.</blockquote>